From Vietnam’s Former DMZ to the Thai-Burma Border

Bainbridge Island, WA- On the eve of Clear Path International’s third anniversary as a humanitarian mine action nonprofit, I set out on a three-week journey through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. I had not been to Southeast Asia to check up on our programs for nearly a year and a half. I am usually busy raising money for our programs and increasing visibility for our work or being a soccer dad.

The voyage was deeply rewarding. It wasn’t just because Dr. Joan Widdifield, one of our most active advisors, and I took in the full scope of our landmine accident survivor assistance projects now stretching from central Vietnam to the Thai-Burma border. And it wasn’t just the realization how far we’ve come as an organization in such a short period. It was the extent to which your contributions have made a profoundly positive impact on the daily existence of individual mine and bomb survivors who would otherwise have no support to regain their footing in life.

Take Ha, for instance. About two decades ago, at age 2, she was severely burned when her mother accidentally set off a white phosphorous grenade near her remote ethnic Biu village on Vietnam’s border with Laos in Quang Binh Province. Because she never received treatment to release her scar tissue, her limbs could not grow normally and part of her calf fused with her thigh, forcing her to get around on her knees. She has no memory of what it’s like to walk. But thanks to Clear Path donor support, she is being treated at the Da Nang Orthopedics & Rehabilitation Center and will soon be able to walk again.

In this manner, Clear Path International has been able to assist more than 800 landmine accident survivors and their families. As a rule, we stay with the survivor families, starting with medical services, prosthetics and rehabilitation and then later providing other necessities such as water, sanitation, scholarships, vocational skills training and other income-generating support. What was striking about our trip and the countless visits with beneficiaries, is seeing the change in their lives just in the year and a half since we saw them last.

Once despondent and depressed because of their hope-shattering life-long injuries, the survivors we met seemed much more independent, not just physically but emotionally and financially. Him Sophal is a case in point. The 36-year-old Cambodian man from Kampong Cham, who has a wife and two young children, lost his leg when he stepped on a landmine in 1996.


He sold lottery tickets for a meager living until he took a half-year electronics repair course at the vocational skills training center launched by Clear Path International and Cambodian Volunteers for Community
Development, our Cambodian partner. Just two months after his graduation, he gets two or three jobs a day from local residents whose radios or televisions need repair and makes a very decent living from his roadside shed advertising his services on a hand-painted wooden sign.

“Things were very difficult for my family,” Him Sophal says, whose wife used to borrow money to feed the children. “Now, we’re paying everybody back, we have plenty to eat and I am able to buy more spare parts for the business.”

After visiting Vietnam and Cambodia, Dr. Widdifield and I ended our trip in Thailand, where we have supported groups providing prosthetics to ethnic refugees from Burma. Here too, we’re providing hope and confidence to disadvantaged mine victims with no other access to physical mobility devices.
We helped set up a prosthetics workshop in a very remote Thai border village north of Chiang Mai so amputees from the nearby Shan refugee camps can get artificial limbs. The shop is not official because Thai authorities don’t like foreign nonprofits to do this kind of work along the border. They don’t even officially admit the camps are there. On the way to the new shop, we passed several police checkpoints that regulalrly search foreign visitors for reporters’ cameras and notebooks so word doesn’t get out about the thousands of Shan refugees forced into Thailand from their villages by the fighting between Burmese troops and Shan secessionists.

These trips to CPI program sites aren’t always easy. Dr. Widdifield and I attended the family funerals of two Vietnamese men who were obliterated when the bomb they found exploded in their backyard. At both homes, the traditionally loud string and drum band playing close to the funeral altar bearing the victims’ photo could not drown out the agonizing cries from wives, daughters and sons mourning their loss behind a veil inside the small house. It was a stark reminder of how the suffering will continue for generations to come as long as the Vietnam war’s lethal ordnance lingers on or beneath the surface. But it also strengthened our resolve to dig in and redouble our efforts to bring attention and resources to this cause and to our work.



Three of us, James and Martha Hathaway and I, started Clear Path in the fall of
2000 with a mere dream of making life better for landmine survivors and their communities. It began with a bomb clearance project in central Vietnam and emergency medical care services for some of the survivors there. Now, we support at least four program staff in each country and reach out to hundreds of survivors. We have removed more than 1,500 pieces of ordnance from dozens of sites in Vietnam (we have since focused on survivor assistance programs). And, we have expanded our medical equipment donations program beyond the region, to include other mine-affected countries around the world. Since we started that program two years ago, we have sent 15 forty-foot containers of hospital equipment and supplies to health care facilities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Jordan, Colombia and the Philippines. Smaller shipments have gone to Uganda, Guatemala and Ecuador.

What I feel more than anything upon my return from Southeast Asia is gratitude. If you, our donors, hadn’t supported and trusted us in such a generous and compassionate way we would not be in such a solid position to reach out to landmine accident survivors and communities when and where they need it most. I already look forward to my next trip, when we will see the evidence of additional survivor assistance in these war-torn areas thanks to your continued support.

Thank you for a wonderful three years!

Imbert Matthee, President